100 Scene Writing Prompts For When You’re Stuck In A Story

Hey there!

Ever get lost on Reddit?

I do. And last week, I came across this gem for beating writer’s block. The post is 6 years old, which predates AI. But that doesn’t mean you can’t leverage AI for inspiration when you’re stuck.

So today, I want to give you two simple prompts to generate 100 situations you can throw at your character mid-scene and get your writing back on track when the muse disappears.

Here’s the Reddit post:

Aside from clarifying that "kill someone" means "in the story" and not in real life, there’s a healthy debate in the comments about whether or not the advice is good.

Most writers pounced.

• “This is the worse writing advice I've seen. Period.”

• “I'm an actual writer, and in 99% of circumstances, this is sht advice.”*

• “This advice is bad, and if you can just haphazardly throw these into your story, then you didn't know the story you were writing anyway and that's your problem.”

So, why am I sharing terrible advice?

Because, it’s not terrible.

You just need a balanced perspective.

Like this:

I’ll probably use this advice for inspiration rather than actual work. It's good to write something just so out of the blue and then later decide whether or not it's a good addition to the story. I usually delete most of my super duper wacky ideas but it feels good to have the option of crazy or cheesy to hype it up, instead of writing everything perfectly the first time

Here’s the thing:

There are going to be days when you get stuck in the middle of a scene.

And everything you try to get unstuck, won’t work.

For example:

• Take a break

• Write poor, edit later

• Skip to the next scene

• Switch your Point of View

• Read a book for inspiration

• And so on.

All good advice, but not always what’s needed.

So…

When you’re really stuck—kill a character!

It's a fun thing to do.

And it helps you look at your story from another perspective.

The truth is, randomly killing a character probably won’t help. But it will help you think about your plot. For example, “How would the story be affected if this character theoretically died? And why aren't these characters doing this other thing instead?, etc.” It’s just something to get you going.

So, go ahead.

• Kill someone

• Write a sex scene

• Make something explode.

Write what goes wrong.

The cheesier the better. It might provide some interesting plot twist ideas. And even if you end up deleting the scene, it’s fine.

Because it’ll get you back on track creatively when you’re stuck.

100 Scene Writing Prompts

Most of these scene prompts will be wildly unrelated to your story.

But this is the point—to get you thinking. And get you writing. Giving your brain a jolt of random ideas will help you make connections in your story that you hadn’t considered.

You can use this AI scene prompt in two different ways.

1. 100 random scene prompts

2. 100 targeted scene prompts for your sub-genre

If you use option 2, there’s a higher probability you’ll be able to keep the scene.

Try them both. And get writing.

Let’s go.

Prompt 1: 100 Scene Prompts

There’s no input required to run this script.

All you have to do is copy the prompt into your favorite AI LLM (ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini) chat window. Then hit enter. In less 2 seconds, you’ll have 100 different prompts to get your creative juices flowing.

Here’s the prompt: